The Wolf of Wall Street
Unlike the last few years, I am not indiscriminately interested in this year’s Academy Award contenders. “Nebraska” sounds boring, “Dallas Buyers Club” has a weird theme so not even Jared Leto and Matthew McConaughey can convince me to watch it, and don’t even get me started on “12 Years a Slave”. I think “Gravity” and “Her” should have won, like, every category except the acting ones. The only film left to see was “The Wolf of Wall Street”. Someone in my former lab claimed that Martin Scorsese was his favorite director, and I realized that I was generally interested in the guy too. He shall be added to the directors list.
Unfortunately, “The Wolf of Wall Street” reminded me way too much of “The Aviator” which I started watching years ago with a friend, and we gave up after 1 1/2 hours. He liked the film and I thought it was utterly boring. Now that I am more interested in films and know a little more about the background of the film, I might pick up “The Aviator” again. But if it’s anything like “The Wolf of Wall Street” that also might never happen.
It’s not like it was a bad movie, in fact many aspects were interesting and I enjoyed much of it. It’s just too much of an autobiography, and more importantly, the guy it is about is not even that interested. Your average Wall Street guy does not lead a life like his; they may all be drugged, they may all be crazy, but not all of them have a young modelesque wife and they rarely start a fraudulent company trying to rival the big investment banks. In fact, most of them are leading relatively boring lives, spending 14+ hours a day at the office and work for, you name it, one of the big investment banks. Just like “The Aviator”, this film recounts the life of a very unusual guy and the film’s success is dependent on how interesting that life actually is. In the case of Jordan Belfort, his life is… OK. I guess I would have preferred less anecdotes, more black humour and, overall, a shorter film. Maybe I just don’t like biographies where a film goes through major events of a person’s life throughout many years. It only worked for “Boyhood” where, notably, the film does not show any major events but barely touches upon it.
I was extremely amused to see the actual Jordan Belfort appear in the film at the very end, it reminded me a lot of Erin Brockovich where the real Erin Brockovich appeared at the beginning of the film. From the few seconds you see Belfort on screen you can easily tell that he’s a salesman – much more so than Leonardo DiCaprio is. Did Leo fail his job this time? Hahaha.
I don’t think I was a huge fan of “The Wolf of Wall Street”, or maybe I just expected something different, but overall it was a fine film.